Agency Is the Job Now

My father spent his career in sales, and one year a trade magazine put him on the cover. The story they ran is the story I grew up on. He had a quota to hit and a prospect he needed in a room, and when he showed up at the man's office, the prospect was out. My dad had brought donuts for the receptionist, because of course he had, and the donuts bought him one piece of intelligence: the prospect was at a blood drive a couple of doors down.

So my dad walked to the blood drive and volunteered to donate. One condition: seat him in the cot next to his prospect. They wired him up, he introduced himself, and for the next thirty minutes he had a captive audience that was physically incapable of walking away. He left a couple of pints lighter and made his quota.

That is high agency. Everything below is commentary.

What I mean by agency

High agency is getting shit done. Around the obstacle if you must, straight through it when that's faster. It is the willingness to do whatever the goal requires, which is exactly why nobody can hand you a checklist of three behaviors that signal it. It looks different every single time, and the moment it becomes a repeatable performance, it has stopped being agency and started being theater.

Here is what mine looked like once. I was working remotely at a company that was mostly in-office, and I needed an infrastructure change. The process said file a ticket, so I filed a ticket, and the ticket sat. My team was blocked and a customer demo was bearing down on us. So I flew out to the office where that department lived, sat down on the corner of the right person's desk, introduced myself, and asked how long the change would actually take. Five minutes, they said.

Great. I'll wait right here.

The change took five minutes. The ticket had been open for weeks. Nothing about my technical ability closed that gap. A plane ticket and a willingness to be slightly ridiculous closed it.

The inversion happened at Opus 4.5

I used to believe technical skill was the spine of an engineering career and agency was the nice-to-have. That ordering inverted, permanently, and I can date it: right around the release of Opus 4.5, when models got good enough to handle most basic software tasks. At least in the domain of writing code, the purely technical part of the job got repriced, and it is not getting repriced back.

Two forces did it together. AI is one. The other is that orgs went flat, and managers no longer have the time to challenge every initiative that crosses their desk. Put those together and the world now belongs to engineers who can drive change on their own and lead technical initiatives without waiting for permission that is never coming.

This applies to everyone, at every level, in engineering, design, and product. A junior engineer who can get the org pointed in a direction, who can mobilize people across a department, is worth more than any staff engineer who cannot. I would go further. I wish compensation followed this model exactly: abolish the engineering levels entirely and pay people by what they mobilize the organization to accomplish. Levels measure what you were. Mobilization measures what you move.

The intern who out-gritted the seniors

One of the highest-agency people I have ever worked with was an intern sweating for a return offer. They were carrying a massive technical problem, hardware talking to software, and solving it meant getting the customer's own people to move. So before asking anyone for anything, the intern built the relationships. Lunches. Conversations about hobbies. Actual interest in actual humans.

When the moment came to mobilize those people toward the goal, they moved, because the intern had already done the unglamorous work of becoming someone they wanted to help. Senior developers at that same company, people with a decade on this kid, could not have pulled it off. Grit does not check your level before it shows up.

What agency is not

Most of what gets sold as high agency is not. It is the content of 90 to 95 percent of LinkedIn posts, and of Harvard Business Review, a publication that at this point is mostly worthless. The tell is that all of it optimizes for being seen working instead of for the goal.

Nights and weekends are the classic version. Unless you are sprinting a deadline for a few days, working outside banking hours is typically extremely low agency. It is an outward signal, "look how hard I'm working," broadcast with effort that would have been better spent actually advancing something. If you cannot 10x what you get done in a day by becoming high agency, that is a skill issue. It was never an hours issue.

Hero culture is the other anti-signal, and it is sneakier because heroes look agentic. The genuinely high-agency person inspires teamwork across whatever org boundaries happen to be in the way. Grinding alone in a vacuum, even with a fleet of agents at your fingertips, is the opposite of agency. It is social disconnect, and it produces frustrated colleagues and stalled goals while feeling tremendously productive from the inside.

AI multiplies whatever you already are

AI is a force multiplier for high agency, nothing more. The data analytics, the information gathering, the code: that is the part of the job that just got repriced. The part that was always valuable, actually accomplishing the thing, is untouched, and AI can muddy the waters around it. You can burn a mountain of tokens and a full day talking to a model without meaningfully advancing a single goal, and it will feel like work the entire time.

The defense is almost embarrassingly simple: get very, very fucking clear on what your goal is and what you are trying to accomplish, every single day. That clarity is the whole discipline. And notice this is the opposite of hustle porn. It is the most direct available path to improving shareholder value, even when the path runs straight through the feelings of people married to the existing way of doing things.

When the environment is the problem

Low agency is the fault of the individual or the fault of management culture, and I have seen the second kind up close. I worked at a Fortune 100 company that was deeply married to an old and consistent way of operating. There was no tolerance for breaking norms, because broken norms made incumbent engineers look stupid, and inflexible thinkers protect themselves before they protect the mission.

That environment cripples high agency. And here is the paradox: it is usually the exact environment that claims to be rooting for it. They judge people on initiative in every review cycle and enable it in none of them. If you are high agency inside a place like that, the ceiling you keep hitting is not yours.

How to screen for it

If you are a hiring manager and you believe any of this, stop reading resumes. A resume is a record of levels held, and I have already told you what levels measure. Ask instead for a quick 30, 60, 90-day plan of what the candidate would accomplish in the role. Better: notice the candidate who sends one without being asked. Anyone with that kind of audacity is worth a conversation, provided the plan holds up.

And if you are the candidate, that is the move. Send the plan. Sit on the desk. Fly out. Figure out what the donuts are in your situation and bring them.

Seven years

The people who do not make this shift will still have a home. That home will mostly be Fortune 100 companies, and those companies will gradually lose business and decay as this model takes over everything around them. Not in five to ten years. Seven. The clock is running, and the blood drive is a couple of doors down.

Get good.

- Dr. J